Corruption, by definition, involves acting without regard for the rule of law. Chinese government efforts to combat corruption are unlikely to succeed so long as the rule of law is flouted throughout China’s justice system. Undoing pervasive corruption will require freeing the judicial system from Communist Party control, ending impunity for senior officials, and implementing genuine legal reforms. [Source]

“President Xi has built his anti-corruption campaign on an abusive and illegal detention system,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch. “Torturing suspects to confess won’t bring an end to corruption, but will end any confidence in China’s judicial system.”

The report is based on 21 Human Rights Watch interviews with four former shuanggui detainees, as well as family members of detainees; 35 detailed accounts from detainees culled from over 200 Chinese media reports; and an analysis of 38 court verdicts from across the country. While there have been commentaries and analyses on the shuanggui system, the Human Rights Watch report is the first to contain firsthand accounts from detainees, as well as drawing on a wide variety of secondary, official sources.

[…] While President Xi has characterized the fight against corruption as a “matter of life and death” for the Communist Party, the same is true for shuanggui detainees: there have been at least 11 deaths in shuanggui custody reported by the media since 2010. In most cases, authorities claimed these were suicides, but family members often suspected mistreatment, and the lack of comprehensive, impartial investigations into these deaths deepens these suspicions. While former detainees reported that the harsh conditions in shuanggui prompted suicidal thoughts, they also said the constant surveillance and the room’s modifications, designed to prevent suicide attempts, made it difficult to put such thoughts into action.

Mr. Xi has made fighting corruption a centerpiece of his administration, and televised shows of officials confessing to taking bribes have been popular. The state-run news media rarely airs criticisms of the detention system. Chinese officials have maintained that the anticorruption investigations are carried out humanely in safe sites and that torture and other abuses have been curtailed by stricter rules and oversight. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, which oversees the local discipline offices, did not answer faxed questions about the report.

“There’s been tightening censorship such that it is even harder than before for the victims of shuanggui and their families to tell the public about abuses they suffered,” Maya Wang, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, said by email. But, she added, “China has a serious corruption problem, and the public supports a tough anticorruption campaign, particularly against government officials.” [Source]

Wang’s comments came at a time when the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and its local branches are under increased scrutiny, as their power to interrogate and detain is not guaranteed or regulated by law.

“Power without containment is dangerous,” Wang said during a trip to Jiangsu province that ended on Tuesday, CCTV reported. He said anti-graft authorities should videotape all interrogations, as well as clarify the rules on handling seized property.

The report on Wang came as a global rights group called on the mainland to stop holding party members without charge, releasing a report criticising the system on the unofficial four-year anniversary of the graft crackdown by President Xi Jinping. [Source]

To relieve the insufferable boredom of this place, I have composed a casual poem:

My Hands

This pair of hands passes steamed buns to you This pair of hands reaches into my stew This pair of hands wipes my butt in full view This pair of hands suffers all that they do But this pair of hands also writes what is true

My little masterpiece reflects daily life at our Detention Center, where neither spoons nor toilet paper is provided to detainees. This is by policy, not accident. […]

[…] The line in my poem about buns refers to another policy at the Center: detainees eat by hand. We are ordered to squat in rows and to pass steamed buns down a line. In addition to the buns, we are given bowls of soupy dishes containing chunks of turnip and cabbage. But we are given no spoons or chopsticks, so when we are finished drinking the soup we have only our hands for getting the chunks of vegetable into our mouths. By the end of a meal everyone’s hands are wet. A few do have spoons, purchased from funds on deposit, but another rule prohibits the lending of spoons.

[…] It is the same at our Center, whose regimen can be explained only as an intentional reduction of people to animals, without dignity and without shame. The word “torture” comes from the Latin torquere “to twist,” and our Center has its repertoire of twisting techniques. People are forced to choose between the humiliation of washing their anuses by hand in public and committing the even greater “crime” of stealing toilet paper, between eating cooked turnip by hand or committing the offense of borrowing a spoon. [Source]

Falun Gong practitioner Hongbin Lin, 43, was a naval officer in the Chinese military who went from “heaven to hell” when he was persecuted for his spiritual beliefs.

[…] Mr Lin said he endured electric shocks while in captivity at the hands of prison authorities. He said criminal inmates were made to help the guards persecute Falun Gong practitioners.

[…] “There would be two electric batons, two policemen, with criminals surrounding me. They pressed me down, stepped on my legs, some grabbed my arms, twisting them behind my back. “(One of them) pressed me on the floor, with both of my legs stepped on by 10 plus people. “Then they shocked me on my head, face, and lower body. They shocked me until their batons ran out of power.

“After shocking me, shackling me to the iron bedframe and depriving me of sleep which lasted up to 15 days at one stretch.”

A recent report by Canadian politician David Kilgour revealed that Falun Gong practitioners, along with ethnic minorities and underground Christians, are also the main targets of large-scale organ harvesting taking place in the country.

In the 446-page book, Mr. Gao describes his time as a prisoner from 2009 to 2014, when he was released and sent to his home in the northwestern province of Shaanxi to live under round-the-clock police surveillance with his older brother, a farmer. The book was introduced in Hong Kong on Tuesday by his daughter, Grace Geng.

[…] Mr. Gao devotes about half of the book, whose Chinese title translates to “The Year 2017, Stand Up, China,” to describing his treatment while he was detained and imprisoned. He writes extensively about how he was threatened, beaten and given electric shocks.

“He stepped on my shoulder, and the severe sound of an electric shocker burst out. He then placed it under my chin,” Mr. Gao wrote of one of his torturers. “I heard another strange sound. Without a doubt, that was from me. I can’t find a more apt description: It was like a sound a dog would make if stomped on its tail by its master, and other times it was as if the dog was being held upside down by its tail.”

A Christian and now a passionate anti-Communist, Mr. Gao spends the middle part of the book arguing why the Chinese Communist Party will collapse in 2017. For this, he appears to draw on a kind of numerology that came to him in a dream. He devotes the last part of the book to describing China after the fall of Communism, when the country will become democratic, led initially by a transition government. [Source]

“We always hear how strong and stalwart a hero is in the face of torture, how he refused to utter a sound, but in my judgment this is utterly bogus and impossible,” Gao writes of the episode. “I’m sure that my screams were absolutely hair-raising and audible for five or six floors in either direction.

“I myself had never before heard the kind of noises I made, which emerged from me of their own volition and outside of my control,” adds Gao, whose wife and two children fled to exile in the United States in 2009.

A spokeswoman for China’s public security ministry told the Associated Press it had no information about Gao’s treatment while in custody or prison and had not been directly involved with his case. [Source]

Isolda Morillo of AP interviewed Gaovia a messaging app about his new book, his thoughts about the future of China’s politics, and his decision to remain in China while his wife and children are now living in the U.S.:

AP: How do you communicate with the outside world? How do you make ends meet?

GAO: I do not have a computer, and of course I don’t have access to the internet. I have been using cellphones — I bought three different cards, but the numbers were halted as soon as (the minders) found out I was using them. I cannot work, but fortunately I don’t need to worry about a livelihood, thanks to my brother, whose land is very fertile.

[…] AP: What are your wishes at the moment? Do you wish to reunite with your family? Would you choose to leave China if you could?

GAO: Of course I wish to reunite with my family; I also wish to be able to work again as a lawyer. But I know that as long as the Communist Party is in power, all these things will not be possible. My ultimate wish is that democracy and a constitutional political system will be established in China, so we can all live in a normal country.

I think change is about to happen here. I know this is not easy to understand, but staying here is the price we need to pay in order to be able to be part of the change. [Source]

]]>194625Lawyers’ Proposals Raised & Rebutted at Two Sessionshttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/03/lawyers-proposals-raised-rebutted-two-sessions/
Tue, 15 Mar 2016 05:12:23 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=192335When Finance Minister Lou Jiwei criticized China’s Labor Contract Law for protecting workers too thoroughly at this year’s Two Sessions in Beijing, Xinhua reported that “the widely held belief that the Great Hall of the People had little room for spontaneous dissent crumbled.” The official backlash against delegate Jiang Hong’s calls for free speech suggests that this space remains tightly constrained, but Lou’s have not been the only critical comments. Legal professionals have challenged various aspects of criminal justice practice in China, particularly the broadcasting of confessions on state television, and torture and obstruction of legal representation during pre-trial detention.

“Outside of a court, no one has the right to decide whether someone is guilty of a crime,” said Zhang Liyong, chief judge of the High People’s Court in central China’s Henan province. “The police aren’t qualified to say someone is guilty. Prosecutors aren’t qualified to declare someone guilty. News media are even less qualified to determine guilt.”

Mr. Zhang made the comments in response to a question from China Real Time on the sidelines of China’s annual legislative sessions, waving off handlers who insisted he was late for a meeting.

[…] Mr. Zhang, known in legal circles for championing more public involvement in court trials through jury-like groups of “people’s assessors,” was not as directly critical of the confessions on Mr. Zhu. But as the president of a provincial High People’s Court, his words carry weight in legal and political circles.

“All the evidence needs to be presented in court, all the arguments need to be made in court, and the final judgement should be based on the court’s investigation and deliberation,” he said, noting that legal authorities had been tasked by the Communist Party with undertaking reforms that promote trial-centered litigation. “There is no other way to see it.” [Source]

Zhang did, though, express approval of reforms to the process of filing cases.

Mr. Zhu also proposed nine judicial reforms that would include expanding bail, allowing lawyers to be present when suspects are interrogated, and articulating conditions for a judge to declare a suspect innocent. Mr. Zhu is criticizing a system with a conviction rate above 99 percent, and in which political influence and people who have not even listened to arguments in court often determine findings of guilt.

A few days later, just as the CPPCC meeting was beginning, Mr. Zhu criticized the dominant influence of the “presumption of guilt” among Chinese “law enforcers.” This presumption, he said, prompts the use of torture, which accelerates the process from arrest to confession. Mr. Zhu observed: “You can imagine how much pressure the court is under if it wants to pass an innocent verdict.”

He further proposed that a law be enacted to protect the right of accused persons to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. More broadly, he urged “proper checks and balances between the work of the police, procurators and the courts, instead of the current practice of close cooperation, which could lead to abuse.”

This comment highlights one of the most distinctive defects of the Chinese criminal process, expressed vividly by a Chinese judge: “As you may know, the police, the judge and the prosecutor are in one family,” quoted in the most authoritative English-language book on Chinese criminal law, “Criminal Justice in China: An Empirical Inquiry,” by Mike McConville et al (p.404, Edward Elgar, 2011). [Source]

The problem, Zhu told Caixin, is that the public security organs are responsible for both investigating and holding suspects. His proposed solution is “separation of investigation and detention,” by reassigning responsibility for pre-trial detention to the Ministry of Justice. This, he argues, could address three difficult problems. It could help basic prevention of forced confessions and excessive detention, safeguarding detainees’ personal rights. It could also protect their rights to meet with lawyers, which Zhu said are often obstructed in order to avoid complicating investigations. “Even if you can meet,” he explained “it’s hard to ensure that you’re not monitored. But if detention centers were neutral ground, separated from Public Security, they would no longer be in direct opposition to legal defense, and lawyers’ difficulty in meeting with clients would naturally be resolved.” Finally, it would help accelerate the progress of rule of law in China, which Premier Li Keqiang announced last week should be “basically in place” by 2020.

Caixin described Zhu’s views as representative of the consensus among legal scholars, noting that Hou Xinyi, a Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference member and associate dean of the Nankai University law school, has been advocating such reforms since 2008. But the Ministry of Public Security, he said, has always claimed that detention centers are already improving, and laughed off the proposal.

“We tried our best to make sure every case processed through the judicial system was fair and justice was served,” Chief Justice Zhou Qiang said when delivering the SPC work report to the National People’s Congress (NPC).

[…] Prosecutors have strived for “constructive interaction with lawyers,” said Procurator-General Cao Jianming, when delivering the SPP work report at the NPC session.

[…] In about 1,000 cases, prosecutors stopped authorities from hindering the work of lawyers.

[…] Courts have upheld the principle of innocence till proven guilty and worked to protect the legal rights of defendants, Zhou said, adding that a total of 1,039 suspects were found not guilty in 2015.

A number of high-profile wrongful convictions were corrected last year while the courts reviewed about 1,300 cases. One such case involved Chen Man, 53, who had spent 23 years in prison for murder and arson. Last month a court overturned his conviction after a 16-year appeal process. [Read more at CDT.]

[…] The number of suspects, placed in custody for more than three years without being charged, reduced from 4,459 in 2013 to six by 2015. [Source]

Authorities describe the introduction of mandatory recording of interrogations as a central reform towards torture reduction. Seton Hall Law School’s Margaret Lewis recently wrote at the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute Blog, though, that it “is not significantly changing the culture of extreme reliance on confessions as the primary form of evidence in criminal cases. […] The value of recordings is further limited if the court does not view the interrogation process with a skeptical eye, if the defense has a difficult time accessing the recordings, or if there simply is no defense lawyer, which is true for most criminal cases.” Human Rights Watch claimed that although the measures appeared to have been helpful, police are often able to circumvent them. Zhu Lieyu’s policy of separating detention and investigation could substantially reduce the opportunities to do so.

“In this climate of thought control and so on imposed by Xi Jinping, it takes a lot of courage to make that kind of criticism,” said Willy Lam, an authority on Chinese elite politics.

[…] Mr. Zhu’s public declaration may also put him at some risk, although his political standing is likely to give him some protection, as will the fact that he has not directly challenged Mr. Xi or the party.

“As a CCPCC delegate, Mr. Zhu’s opinions are more or less protected, at least in the month of March,” said Joshua Rosenzweig, an independent human rights researcher in Hong Kong. He expressed doubt that the proposal, one of many the body will consider, would accomplish much.

“But it is significant that the press is covering this. There’s no doubt a certain degree of unhappiness over the televised confessions and the recent push to stress the media’s position as part of the ‘party family.’ This is a way to push back a bit,” he said. [Source]

In China, politics continues to control law. The current leadership has rejected many of the universal legal values that China accepted — at least in principle — under communist rule in some earlier eras. Today, for example, to talk freely about constitutional reform, even within the sheltered confines of universities and academic journals, is not a safe enterprise. And discussion of judicial independence from the Communist Party at the central level is a forbidden subject.

Yet there is discreet, if passive, resistance. Legal professionals are not happy, but they dare not speak for fear of losing their jobs. Some are simply giving up. In Beijing, reportedly, many judges have recently resigned in order to find other work, as lawyers, in business, or in academia. This dissatisfaction could become a crisis for the Chinese legal system.

[…] The very success of over three decades of legal education and practice has created a new legal elite. Thus a large number of people — legislative staff, judges, prosecutors, lawyers, administrators, legal scholars, and even police — want to inhabit a real legal system, not one that has the appearance of integrity but functions arbitrarily. They take legal reforms seriously and know that it is necessary not only to enact good rules, but also to implement them. In China, as many people have observed, faithful implementation is the name of the game, but it remains extremely difficult. Unfortunately, new judicial reforms may prove disappointing. […]

Judicial reform is one of the main challenges now confronting Chinese President Xi Jinping. Despite his emphasis on “rule of law,” Xi wants local courts reliably to submit to the discipline of the central party and judicial officials. He doesn’t want local judges to be independent of the central government, but he does aim to stop the local influences that distort local judgments. It’s too early to tell whether this effort and the parallel effort to improve the competence, status, and compensation of judges will succeed. But broad public dissatisfaction with the courts will probably continue, especially to the extent they continue to be instructed not to accept sensitive, controversial cases. [Source]

In trying to perform their professional roles Chinese lawyers are bound to meet serious obstacles. These can be related to corruption as much as to political control. For example, courts refuse to take on cases; criminal defense lawyers are denied access to clients in detention; witnesses for the defense are not heard in court; lawyers are interrupted and/or not listened to in court.

[…] When they confront party-state illegality[, rights] lawyers tend to make different choices from other professional colleagues. Generally, they insist on following legal rules, resist illegal pressure, and refuse to be – indeed given their vulnerable status, they cannot afford to be – corrupt. They expose the flaws of the system, try to put pressure on the officials handling a particular case and call for improvements. Doing so is hard and risky. […]

Today, rights lawyers have many more options for ‘taking the action from inside to outside the courtroom.’ They can, for example, tweet (use social media) to report in real time about an ongoing ‘sensitive’ trial; disseminate images of ‘flash’ demonstrations through the social media; and document state illegality using smartphones and other technology. As they number a few hundred now, rights lawyers also have different ways of networking all across the country, working not only with professional colleagues but also with certain client groups, such as petitioners and other human rights defenders. They still don’t win cases but their advocacy may be able to protect clients from further abuse; and it sends out a political message of resistance to arbitrariness and power abuses in the legal system.

[…] The hope of incremental liberalization through top-down legal reforms was extremely important in the post-Mao era but today, in my view, it is very nearly dead. Under Xi Jinping especially, the law has been changed to accommodate rather than curb power abuses. Law is not seen as imposing limits on the power of the government; rather, it is an expression of the power of the ruling Party, including ruthless power to control its own bureaucracy. This is not to deny, of course, that there are occasional welcome changes, for example, the decision to abolish the feared “re-education through labor” system in 2013. But such changes generally look better on paper than in reality and do not address the central challenge of power abuse. For example, the government continues to lock people up under numerous forms of detention without due – or simply without any – legal process. The Party’s vision for 2020 is therefore Party rule by law, at best – legal rules used when it serves power-holders, and disregarded when it does not. [Source]

2015 will go down in history as the year that Chinese authorities launched an unprecedented attack on China’s human rights lawyers. Since July, in coordinated nationwide operations, police summoned more than 300 lawyers and activists for interrogation and put many under secret detention, including some in “residential surveillance in a designated location,” a de facto type of enforced disappearance. For months, authorities deprived the detainees access to legal counsel and refused to inform families of their whereabouts. At the time of this report, 22 lawyers and activists remain in custody from this crackdown; 19 of these have been formally arrested, including 16 in January 2016. Of the 19 arrested, all but three face charges of “subversion” or “inciting subversion of state power.” These individuals are all being punished for seeking justice—boldly challenging the CCP-ruled government’s interference in the judiciary, standing up for clients’ rights, and refusing to yield to state pressure. In addition, throughout the year, rights lawyers continued to be subjected to violent beatings while carrying out their professional work in defending their clients. CHRD documented eight incidents of violence—against 13 defense lawyers— between January to June 2015.

[…] One especially disturbing development during the year was authorities’ use of the newly amended Criminal Law to stifle defense lawyers’ speech during court trials. Amendments to the CL that went into effect on November 1, 2015, codify the criminalization of lawyers’ speech during trials; specifically, it can be considered illegal for defense lawyers to speak up in court to challenge unlawful trial procedures or mistreatment of their clients (Article 309). The provision, which penalizes “disrupting courtroom order,” gives authorities broad powers to interpret lawyers’ speech in court as “insulting,” “threatening,” or “disruptive”—an offense punishable by up to three years in prison. Under the law, judges can also order lawyers expelled from the court. [Source]

The use of such a form reveals the cavalier manner in which the police violate their nation’s Criminal Procedure Law by arbitrarily denying the right to counsel in their attack on rights lawyers and other human rights advocates whom they have detained. Indeed, the police are doing exactly what Article 9 of the major September 2015 Five-Institution Regulation interpreting the 2012 Criminal Procedure Law explicitly forbids. They are failing to give lawyers requesting a meeting with their detained clients the reasons for rejecting the meeting.

[…] According to the law, lawyers should be able to vindicate their rights by seeking administrative review of the police refusal at the next higher police level and by asking the local procuracy to investigate the arbitrary police refusal. Such efforts are apparently being made but no one is holding his breath in the expectation that this will bring relief. For example, over 15 years later I am still waiting for the office of the Supreme People’s Procuracy in Beijing to send me its promised report reviewing the lawless detention of a Sino-American joint venture’s Chinese CFO by the city of Jining in Shandong Province. [Source]

“Firstly, they wouldn’t produce written confirmation that Wang Yu has terminated her instructions to me,” [Wang Yu’s lawyer Wen Donghai] said. “Neither would they let me visit Wang Yu to confirm it in person.”

“Given the circumstances, I’d say it is the police who are firing us.”

[…] “Basically, they are now hiring the lawyers; they won’t allow the families to do it,” he said. “This is ridiculous, and it is in breach of existing law on lawyers, and of the Criminal Procedure Law.”

Meanwhile, lawyer Huang Hanzhong, who represents Wang’s husband Bao Longjun, said he had received a similar notification after trying to visit his client at the Tianjin No. 2 Detention Center.

“Actually I had been expecting this, although I hoped it wouldn’t happen,” Huang said. “It shows what the attitude of the prosecuting authorities is; they are acting irrationally, unreasonable and illegally according to existing rules and legislation.” [Source]

In the course of my research on Chinese human rights lawyers over the past several years, I got to hear a lot about the techniques the government allegedly uses to control them. I came to refer to them as “fear techniques.” They included tracking and following; soft detention; “being traveled”; being asked in for “chats”; criminal, administrative, and judicial detention; violent attacks; forced disappearance; torture and—in one or two particularly disturbing instances—brief spells of medically unmotivated, forced psychiatric detention (被精神病). Some of these techniques made some reference to legal rules, but in their actual use of these rules against human rights lawyers, the authorities invariably, and quite often egregiously, broke the law.

Those forcibly “disappeared,” for example, were, in addition to being locked up, reportedly pressured to “confess” and “repent.” They usually also had to promise—in writing as well as in front of a camera recording their statements—that they would stop their work as human rights defenders: stop taking on certain kinds of cases, stop meeting each other, and so on. It did not matter that there were no crimes to confess to and that promises made under duress were not binding. As one lawyer commented in 2011, “Not only did they want to make you say that black was white, you also had to explain why black was white.” The point, he thought, was to show who was master and show that no law—not even that of elementary logic—constrained the power he had tried to resist. The authorities using these fear techniques were intent on stopping the lawyers’ efforts to represent their clients and to challenge power abuses, while dreaming of (if not actually building) a better system.

As the language of reform —according to a dictionary definition, “improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory”—which was so long considered axiomatic for discussions of the Chinese legal system, is now being questioned more widely, I would suggest that rule by fear should be considered as a centrally important element of the “new normal” under Xi Jinping’s party leadership. [Source]

To be fair, the Chinese government has introduced discrete reforms that could decrease the prevalence of torture. The Committee against Torture flagged a number of these positive aspects in its Concluding Observations. Yet each of these reforms needs to be analyzed with a critical eye because, as Teng Biao, a Chinese human rights lawyer, astutely explained, “The major problem with rule of law in mainland China is not establishing legal provisions but rather implementing laws.” And here lies the key problem: the Chinese government places perpetuating one-party rule above a robust commitment to the rule of law and human rights.

[…] One of the most exciting recent developments in criminal procedure reforms has been the use of audio and video recordings of interrogations. […] The hope is that recording interrogations will both provide evidence of how individual cases are handled and encourage a change in police culture away from coercive practices.

Preliminary indications are, however, that recording interrogations is not significantly changing the culture of extreme reliance on confessions as the primary form of evidence in criminal cases. […]

[…] The value of recordings is further limited if the court does not view the interrogation process with a skeptical eye, if the defense has a difficult time accessing the recordings, or if there simply is no defense lawyer, which is true for most criminal cases. Suspects need lawyers in order to understand their rights and then have someone advocate for those rights. No recording, even if completely accurate, can ever replace these fundamental functions. The Chinese government is increasingly intolerant of defense lawyers who zealously advocate for clients’ rights leading to reprisals against the lawyers rather than praise for their contributions to the rule of law. The Committee against Torture expressed deep concern for the recent crackdown on defense lawyers stating, “This reported crackdown on human rights lawyers follows a series of other reported escalating abuses on lawyers for carrying out their professional responsibilities, particularly on cases involving government accountability and issues such as torture, defence of human rights activists and religious practitioners.” [Source]

“We are seeing a very worrying pattern in China that has serious implications for civil society and the important work they do across the country,” the High Commissioner said. “Civil society actors, from lawyers and journalists to NGO workers, have the right to carry out their work, and it is the States’ duty to support and protect them,” he said.

The High Commissioner said he appreciated the opportunity to raise such cases with Chinese officials in Geneva, and acknowledged their efforts to clarify the matters at issue. However, the responses he received indicate that the authorities “too often reflexively confuse the legitimate role of lawyers and activists with threats to public order and security.”

[…] “Lawyers should never have to suffer prosecution or any other kind of sanctions or intimidation for discharging their professional duties” Zeid said, adding that lawyers have an essential role to play in protecting human rights and the rule of law.

“I urge the Government of China to release all of them immediately and without conditions.” [Source]

On 16 February 2016, in response to the press release by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mr. Zeid Ra’ad HUSSEIN on several individual cases of China, the Spokesperson of the Permanent Mission of China made the following clarifications, stressing that all those cases raised involve illegal and criminal activities, and has nothing to do with restrictions of the rights and freedoms. The Chinese Mission expresses strong dissatisfaction and disagreement with the High Commissioner’s misleading remarks.

[…] China is ruled by law and everyone is equal before the law, no matter what his/her occupation is. All Chinese laws, including the National Security Law, give emphasis to promoting and protecting human rights. Meanwhile, undermining social stability and order in the name of exercising human rights and freedom of expression will not be allowed in any country ruled by law. The High Commissioner made irresponsible comments in disregard of facts, which is sending to the outside world a wrong signal. We hope that Mr. Hussein as UN human rights chief could view China’s human rights in a comprehensive, objective and rational manner, rather than a biased, subjective and selective way. [Source]

The ABA’s professional staff in Washington opposed any public condemnation. They feared that, in the current repressive atmosphere in Beijing, the association’s China office might be shut down and some of their Chinese staff detained.

[…] Some American lawyers even favor taking the initiative now to close the ABA’s China office until the human-rights pendulum begins to swing in a positive direction again. They believe that little significant law-reform progress can be made in China in the present climate and the office is a hostage that impedes an appropriate response to repression.

But if the ABA leaves China, what will become of the Chinese staff and their American colleagues in terms of employment and personal safety? Pulling out isn’t likely to dissuade the Xi regime from its repression.

In principle, tens of thousands of China’s judges, prosecutors, lawyers, administrators, law professors and students who helplessly oppose the current repression would welcome a stronger foreign protest. But ABA withdrawal might also create a sense of abandonment by those who have encouraged Beijing’s efforts to develop a genuine rule of law. One has to weigh the world-wide effects of its strong condemnation of Beijing’s repression against the loss of the valuable training contribution resulting from the ABA’s forcible or voluntary withdrawal from China.

[…] President Xi is playing a rough game, and cooperation between foreigners and Chinese in the legal field may become extremely difficult during the rest of his tenure. Powerful opposition both within and outside China offers the only hope of improving a dire situation. This is a messy, unhappy time for the rule of law in China, and there are no good solutions. [Source]

In a prison courtroom, Hainan’s top judge, Fu Qin, bowed to Chen in apology on behalf of the court, which issued the death sentence 21 years ago, said Chen’s lawyer, Wang Wanqiong.

[…] The fairness of Chen’s trial was questioned at the time, with his lawyer identifying 18 contradictions in his testimony, Thepaper.cn reported yesterday.

Wang said Chen was tortured into confessing. “He was strangled until he almost suffocated and his joints were beaten with sticks and steel rods,” she said.

[…] The authorities have yet to announce an investigation into the judges, prosecutors and police officers involved in the original verdict. “Chen said those people should be held responsible, but he had no hatred towards them and believed it should be left to the law to decide,” Wang said. [Source]

Accountability for acts carried out in individual cases is perhaps the easy part; much more difficult is to assess responsibility for the deeper institutional causes underlying wrongful convictions—such as the role that inter-institutional “coordination” plays in weakening the procedural checks that are supposed to protect suspects and defendants from miscarriages of justice. The worst outcome would be for accountability in the Huugjilt case to be merely a propaganda effort aimed at convincing the public of authorities’ sincerity at tackling the problem of wrongful convictions. Punishing Feng Zhiming for wrongdoing is only the first step. What’s even more essential is to bring an end to the ways that campaign-style “strike hard” policing and stability-first policies have shaped practices within the Chinese criminal justice system for decades. [Source]

The main reason for the spate of confessional television in China is, in fact, political: it is a conscious policy of the regime of Xi Jinping, China’s ruler for the past three years. In an illuminating essay last March, David Bandurski of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong pointed out that what he called “China’s confessional politics of dominance” has its roots in the Communist Party’s own history, and in the Soviet influences that helped shape it before it took power. Confession and self-criticism have been part of its ruling strategy since its revolutionary leaders lived in caves in Yan’an and plotted against their neighbouring cavemen. Virtually everybody in China—even Deng Xiaoping and, almost certainly during Mao’s rule, Mr Xi himself—has written at least one piece of self-criticism. At the other end of the scale, even Banyan has done it, when he was a student and later reporter in China, with a few eloquent self-flagellations—now (he hopes) gathering dust in some forgotten archive.

In writing self-criticism, the secret is to ponder not truth, justice or cultural norms, but what your reader wants. As Mr Bandurski put it: “As in the past, today’s culture of confession is not about accountability, clean government or a rules-based system. It is about dominance and submission.” Mr Xi’s revival of this culture is not accidental. It is a reminder that his party’s tolerance for dissent is lower now than at any time since the early 1990s. One symptom of this is its insistence that China’s people—and foreigners working in the country—must accept that, even if they cannot love him, Big Brother is right. [Source]

The panel of 10 independent experts welcomed changes undertaken by China since its last appearance in 2008, including amendments to its criminal procedure law that prohibited the use of confessions obtained through torture and required audio or video recordings of interrogations in major cases. It also noted China’s abolition of re-education through labor and changes to a law covering the treatment of refugees.

Yet, “there is a long way to go to reform the criminal justice system in China and somehow the problems are entrenched both in legislation and in practice,” George Tugushi, one of the panel’s two main investigators on China, told journalists in Geneva.

[…] The panel expressed regret that China had not put in place recommendations dating from 2009 for providing legal safeguards against torture, concluding that it “is still deeply entrenched in the criminal justice system, which overly relies on confessions as the basis for convictions.”

Moreover, the panel expressed concern over amendments to the criminal procedure law that now permit holding people under “residential surveillance” for up to six months for undefined crimes of endangering state security. […] [Source]

The U.N. watchdog said it had numerous credible reports that “document in detail cases of torture, deaths in custody, arbitrary detention and disappearances of Tibetans”.

“We can also say that some of the problem pointed out in 2008 are still problems,” panel member Jens Modvig told a news briefing. “China has not provided data about complaints over torture, about investigations, about possible convictions for torture and data on death in custody and the like.”

[…] “When you are accused of a crime of national security you do not have the right to fundamental safeguards, namely access to a lawyer. This is for an indefinite time, you will have access to a lawyer when the prosecution determines the reason for the detention have disappeared,” chairman Claudio Grossman told Reuters.

[…] Voicing concern at deaths in custody and the alleged lack of prompt medical care, it cited the cases of the activist Cao Shunli and Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, a prominent Tibetan monk. She died in jail last year and he in July 2015.

The U.N. experts decried China’s use of an interrogation chair with restraints. [Source]

Liu’s ordeal illuminates the grisliest corners of China’s criminal justice system, and his release highlights a potential bright spot in the sweeping judicial reforms initiated by Chinese President Xi Jinping: a concerted push to redress wrongful convictions and curb the use of torture in interrogations.

[…] “I think [reforms to address wrongful convictions] are actually a positive story of legal reform, and I’m not Pollyannic about the subject in general,” says Ira Belkin, executive director of the US-Asia Law Institute. “But it does raise the question: Can you make significant positive strides in these cases while all this other negative stuff is going on?”

To this day, the “negative stuff” abounds: a fierce crackdown on human rights lawyers, humiliating televised “confessions” by those who crossed authorities, the arrest or intimidation of grassroots activists ranging from feminists to environmentalists. Academics and activists say the scope and intensity of the crackdown has effectively crippled an emerging Chinese civil society that seeks to curb government excesses and empower citizens.

Somewhere between Liu’s release and the arrest of these activists lies Xi’s vision for the rule of law with Chinese characteristics — an efficient, rules-based system for ordinary citizens accused of ordinary crimes, but one that shows zero tolerance for grassroots challenges to Chinese Communist Party power.

That’s a model that aims to smother two sparks for social unrest: blatant miscarriages of justice and activists who publicize blatant miscarriages of justice. But given the sheer size of China’s sprawling judicial and police bureaucracies, Xi’s top-down reforms face a huge challenge. Can a highly centralized system — one that quashes all grassroots participation — possibly play watchdog over dingy interrogation rooms in villages across this vast country? […] [Source]

Chinese government officials told the 10 independent experts that their country was working to eliminate torture including through better training of police and prison guards, and audio and video recordings of interrogations.

“Our efforts have produced major progress in our combat against torture,” Wu Hailong, China’s ambassador who heads its delegation of 39 senior officials, told the UN body, which is also reviewing the records of Hong Kong and Macao.

Illegally obtained evidence and forced self-incrimination of detainees are banned, Wu said, “thus preventing interrogation through torture”. He conceded that there was “still a long and arduous path ahead before elimination of torture”. […] [Source]

The experts asked questions about the independence of the judiciary, prisoner access to lawyers, the length of pretrial detention, the forced repatriation of North Koreans and about psychiatric treatment and shock therapy practiced on gay people. Panel members commented repeatedly on the lack of detail in China’s replies to their requests for information.

[…T]he committee cited a Human Rights Watch analysis of 432 verdicts since the start of 2014 in court cases where suspects said they were tortured. Only 23 resulted in evidence’s being thrown out of court and none resulted in the prisoner’s acquittal, the panel noted. What measures were taken against those who extracted the confession? the panel asked.

Mr. Wu also said that judicial authorities and prison workers were receiving anti-torture training and that the rights of lawyers were being strengthened. “Lawyers are an indispensable part in China’s rule of law,” he said. “A key component of our plan to comprehensively advance law-based governance is to strengthen and protect lawyers’ rights to practice law.”

Members of the panel were not convinced. In questions presented over more than two hours, they pressed for details about the number of lawyers now in detention and what the charges were; the number of black, or unofficial, places of detention that exist; the number of prisoners held in those places and who controlled them; what access prisoners had to medical care; the number of cases of torture authorities had recorded; and the number of torture cases involving Tibetan prisoners. […] [Source]

“The Chinese government prohibits torture and prosecutes any personnel or state organs for torture activities,” Li Wensheng, deputy director-general of the legal affairs department in the ministry of public security, told the U.N. Committee against Torture.

[…] Golog Jigme, a prominent Tibetan monk who broke out of a Chinese detention centre in 2012 and attended the session after receiving Swiss asylum last month, voiced disappointment.

“Back in Tibet I was used to Chinese propaganda and to hearing lies each and every time there were communications by the Chinese government,” he told Reuters. “I can honestly say there was not the slightest truth in anything they said today.

“Regarding the interrogation chair, which was highly debated today, they said it was for the detainee’s safety. Look at my wounds, on my hands and feet, in fact it was brutal torture.”

Dolkun Isa of the World Uyghur Congress told Reuters: “Most answers are not the reality, they are avoiding to answer the questions … I am not optimistic China will really do some improvements.” […] [Source]

Just ahead of the U.N. Committee on Torture hearing, rights groups castigated the recent repatriation of two Chinese dissidents by Thai authorities. The two men were returned to China despite winning refugee status from the U.N. A report from Amnesty International warns that they could now be in serious risk of torture, and calls for concerned parties to write Chinese authorities in Beijing:

Chinese activists Jiang Yefei (left) and Dong Guangping are at grave risk of torture and other ill-treatment, as well as unfair trials in China after having been deported from Thailand by local authorities. They had been arrested by Thai authorities on 28 October 2015 for not having valid visas. Their families have not received official notice of their deportation, which took place between 12 and 16 November, and neither have their families been able to contact them since 5 November.

Both men had previously been detained in China for their peaceful activism. Jiang Yefei, was detained and tortured in China in May and August of 2008 after criticizing the official response to the 2008 earthquake in China’s Sichuan province. He fled to Thailand with his wife shortly after and in April 2015, was granted refugee status by the UNHCR.

Dong Guangping was detained by Chinese authorities from May 2014 to February 2015 after participating in an event commemorating victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. He arrived in Thailand with his wife and daughter in September this year to escape harassment. At the time of his arrest, he had a pending request for refugee status with UNHCR. This has since been approved. […] [Source]

The world body’s refugee agency, UNHCR, did not name the activists or their nationalities but said it was “deeply concerned over the refoulement of two recognised refugees from Thailand”.

It said the men had been approved to be resettled outside Thailand and China and were due to depart days after the unannounced deportation this weekend.

“This action by Thailand is clearly a serious disappointment, and underscores the longstanding gap in Thai domestic law concerning ensuring appropriate treatment of persons with international protection needs,” the UNHCR said.

Thailand has not signed the 1951 refugee convention and does not recognise the status of refugees and asylum seekers. However, the government asserts that it observes the convention in practice.

[…] Under the current ruling junta, Thailand has strengthened ties with China, including signing an agreement to boost joint military engagement over the next five years, from intelligence sharing to fighting international crime. [Source]

The decision to deport the men last week showed the Chinese government’s growing power to persuade other countries to deny its citizens refuge, said William Nee, a researcher on China for Amnesty International.

“This deportation fits a worrying new pattern of China putting pressure on third-party countries to repatriate dissidents and others who have left China for economic and social reasons,” said Mr. Nee, who is based in Hong Kong. “China now seems more willing than ever to exert its influence internationally to ensure that its crackdown on human rights domestically can go on unimpeded.”

[…] The Chinese government has taken increasingly forceful steps to prevent citizens from fleeing into Southeast Asia, especially through Myanmar and on to Thailand, where many then try to leave for other, more welcoming countries. [Source]

The report, No End in Sight, documents how criminal justice reforms hailed as human rights advances by the Chinese government have in reality done little to change the deep-rooted practice of torturing suspects to extract forced confessions. Attempts by defence lawyers to raise or investigate torture claims continue to be systematically thwarted by police, prosecutors and the courts.

“In a system where even lawyers can end up being tortured by the police, what hope can ordinary defendants have?” said Patrick Poon, China Researcher at Amnesty International.

[…] The report documents torture and ill-treatment in pre-trial detention, including beatings by police or by other detainees with the officers’ knowledge or upon their orders. Tools of torture described include iron restraint chairs, tiger benches – in which individuals’ legs are tightly bound to a bench, with bricks gradually added under the victim’s feet, forcing the legs backwards – as well as long periods of sleep deprivation and the denial of sufficient food and water.

[…] The report shows that over the past two years the authorities have made increasing use of a new form of incommunicado detention called “residential surveillance in a designated location”, that was formalized in law in 2013 when revisions to China’s Criminal Procedure Law took effect.

Under this system, people suspected of terrorism, major bribery or state security offences can be held outside the formal detention system at an undisclosed location for up to six months, with no contact with the outside world, leaving the detainee at grave risk of torture and other ill-treatment.

Twelve lawyers and activists caught up in the ongoing crackdown against human rights and legal activists are currently being held in “residential surveillance in a designated location” on state security charges. Amnesty International considers all of them to be at serious risk of torture and ill-treatment and has called for the Chinese government to release them and drop all charges against them. […] [Source]

Poon said the Chinese government had taken some steps over the past five years to tackle the problem of torture. In 2012 Beijing vowed to “enforce preventive and remedial measures to prevent extortion of confession by torture and collecting evidence through illegal methods”. Xinhua, China’s official news agency, has reported on plans to introduce real-time monitoring and control management of interrogation sessions using audio and video equipment.

However, Amnesty said such reforms had “in reality done little to change the deep-rooted practice of torturing suspects to extract forced confessions”. Chinese law outlawed only certain acts of torture and did not cover acts of mental torture, the group said. Lawyers trying to investigate or seek redress for such cases were “systematically thwarted by police, prosecutors and the courts”.

Human Rights Watch calls on the Chinese government to commit at the review to enacting fundamental reforms that could enable defense lawyers, the judiciary, and independent monitors to play their proper role in countering torture. The government should:

Ensure that anyone taken into police custody be promptly brought before a judge, normally within 48 hours of being apprehended;

Revise the Criminal Procedure Law to ensure that suspects may have lawyers present during any police questioning and interrogations, and stipulate suspects’ right to remain silent during questioning; and

Transfer the power to manage detention centers from the Ministry of Public Security to the Ministry of Justice. [Source]

“Every time we emerge from the prison alive, it is a defeat for our opponents,” Gao said in the face-to-face interview.

Gao, who lives under near-constant guard in Shaanxi province, gave the interview earlier this year on the condition that it not be published or aired for several months, until he could finish the manuscripts of two books and send them safely outside of China for publication, which he now says he has done. He also later sent the AP his manuscripts and gave permission to quote from them.

[…] In his book he says he endured more torture, including with an electric baton to his face — a moment that he remembers as a near out-of-body experience when he heard his own voice.

“Undoubtedly, it was from me. I don’t know how to describe it,” Gao wrote. “That sound was almost like a dog howling when its tail is forcibly stepped on by its master. Sometimes it sounded like what a puppy makes when it’s hung upside by its tail.” [Source]

Dear wife, when I first heard that you were going to meet the Deputy Secretary of State in private on the 23rd, I thought it was very inappropriate. Forgive my direct speech: I strongly oppose this.

Firstly, even if it was an open meeting with the president, it’s not what we need right now—how much less a private meeting with his subordinate. Why go about it so secretly? What is there to be afraid of? Who’s the one afraid? Who doesn’t want to be seen in the light of day holding the meeting?

[…] Western politicians as a whole have a long history of getting along with evil regimes for their own selfish and greedy ends. […] Since the Clinton era, the American political class has disregarded the basic calls of humanity and muddied itself by getting so close to the sinister Communist Party. When these politicians raise their glasses together, justice, human dignity, and conscience, are all given a price tag. The Party officials who commit crimes against humanity still go about with their heads high, having long forgotten their indelible bloody crimes. The Western politicians who have become their accomplices have forsaken the conscience and sense of honor that humans should have. [Source]

As the AP reports, Gao claims to have received a divine revelation that Communist Party rule will end in 2017, and believes that contact with its Western “accomplices” in the meantime is pointless.

]]>187230Tales of Torture: Time Spent in Chinese Police Custodyhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/06/tales-torture-time-spent-chinese-police-custody/
Tue, 30 Jun 2015 00:58:09 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=184538In a report for the South China Morning Post, Verna Yu relays harrowing accounts of torture from Chinese dissidents and activists who had been subjected to a wide range of physical and emotional abuse while in police custody:

During his ordeal, Cai was questioned for long hours while restrained in an “interrogation chair”, which was suspended more than 1.2 metres off the ground, with his hands cuffed onto a wooden board while his feet were left hanging.

[…]Ran Chongbi, a petitioner who was released last month after being held in Beijing’s Fengtai district police detention centre for eight months for “provoking trouble”, said she was handcuffed and had her feet manacled for three months.

[…]Lawyer Yu Wensheng, who was held for 99 days on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” after trying to help a detained supporter of Hong Kong’s Occupy movement, also said he had experienced torture in custody. He claimed he was often interrogated for 16 hours a day, given an inadequate amount of food, often had to sleep on the floor and lived in cramped conditions.

[…] Lawyers and rights groups say abuses in custody are due to unchecked police power and are facilitated by suspects not having access to lawyers and relatives.

[…] Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia director of Amnesty International, said torture remained “endemic” in China. Unless the government’s torture curbing measures were matched with reforms to grant defendants’ the right to silence, right to legal representation and lawyers’ access, “they are not going to make a significant difference”, he said. [Source]

]]>184538China Hails “Tremendous” Human Rights Progresshttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/06/china-trumpets-tremendous-human-rights-progress/
Tue, 09 Jun 2015 03:19:51 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=184109The State Council Information Office today released a white paper titled “Progress in China’s Human Rights in 2014,” the twelfth such report since its 45,000 word tome in 1991. The paper’s introduction hails “tremendous achievements” made under the guidance of the CCP last year, demonstrating the country’s progress on the “correct path of human rights development that suits its national conditions.” The following nine chapters each cover a different realm of human rights, illustrated with a dizzying selection of government statistics.

China has also made notable progress in improving the right to development, which is a fundamental human right for people of the world’s largest developing country.

According to the report, the country’s annual per capita disposable income reached 20,167 yuan (3,290 U.S. dollars) in 2014, up 8 percent over the previous year and faster than the economic growth rate last year.

Substantial efforts were made to alleviate poverty, including more government funds for infrastructure in the least-developed rural areas and relocation of people in uninhabitable regions.

[…] Unfortunately, some countries have always turned a blind eye to Chinese progress in human rights or even slung mud over its record in this regard.

The concept of human rights varies in different countries and will be updated according to the changing reality. The rest of the world should respect China’s unique conditions and traditions. [Source]

In the report’s first section, titled “Right to Development,” this year’s white paper backed up Beijing’s claim to have better protected the Chinese people’s cultural rights by pointing to, among other things, China’s burgeoning television, cartoon and film production.

In 2014, the paper noted, China produced 429 TV series, accounting for 15,983 episodes, and cartoon programs amounting to 138,496 minutes. The report also flagged growth on the silver screen, saying the country produced a total of 618 feature films — 36 of which earned more than 100 million yuan each — and racked up total box office revenues of 26.9 billion yuan ($4.3 billion) last year.

The latter figure represented a 36% increase over 2013, the white paper said. It wasn’t clear from the report how that growth related to human rights. The State Council Information Office, which produced the report, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[…] The report said that 90% of the economic and social development goals set out in the country’s most recent five-year plan had either been exceeded, nearly fulfilled or made smooth progress. It also said China had achieved most of the targets set out in a four-year national human rights action plan set to end this year. It did not identify in either case which targets had been missed. [Source]

“The human rights record last year was particularly appalling, even compared to China’s poor human rights records in previous years,” said Maya Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“In 2014 the government detained a large number of activists, tightened or passed new regulations to restrict freedom of the press and freedom of speech on the internet and in universities, and made significant moves to push people to adhere strictly to Party ideology, as exemplified by Document No. 9,” Wang told dpa. [For further context on Document No. 9, or the related 2014 detention and recent sentencing of journalist Gao Yu, see prior coverage via CDT.]

[…] Monday’s white paper also said China’s legal reforms gained momentum last year, citing the October adoption by the leadership of a blueprint to promote the rule of law.

[…] However, Chinese lawyers say not much has changed, while working conditions for some have worsened.

“Authorities have done a lot of work on paper, but at this point, very little has changed in actual practice,” human rights lawyer Mo Shaoping told dpa. […] [Source]

The report, released without warning by the State Council today, is also an illustration of the disconnect between China’s definition of human rights and that of its critics. Specifically, China equates economic development with human rights—as opposed to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights which includes statements such as “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” and “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.”

[…] A recent Human Rights Watch Report criticizes China’s penal system for torturing arrested suspects by beating them, shackling them to chairs, or hanging them by their hand cuffs. Other groups have criticized the increase in arrests of moderate activists, human rights lawyers, and regular citizens.

Chinese officials, in contrast, view arrests as a sign of better policing. The white paper says that over the past year it has prosecuted 712 people for crimes of terrorism and “inciting separatism,” a charge often given to activists in Tibet or Xinjiang. The report also says that 168,900 people were arrested last year for drug-related crimes. [Source]

The freedom of speech is being better protected in China, as the country is working to promote citizens’ democratic rights, a white paper on China’s human rights said Monday.

[…] The public can air opinions, and raise criticisms and suggestions freely through the news media, and discuss problems of this country and society, it said.

The government encourages enterprises to provide various Internet services to the public in accordance with the law so as to create a good environment for the public to acquire and exchange information, the white paper said, adding that a cleaner cyber space is becoming an ever important place for the public to get information and make their voices heard. [Source]

On the same day as the release of the white paper, British activist group Free Tibet released a statement saying that ongoing construction efforts put forth by Beijing have polluted the only water source in the Tibetan village of Shadrang. The report says that various infrastructure and mining projects have disrupted the natural habitat and have had a profound effect on resources for local residents.

“Infrastructure projects in Tibet are motivated by China’s focus on resource exploitation, not the interests of Tibetans,” Alistair Currie, campaigns and media manager for Free Tibet, said in a statement. “Roads and highways facilitate the movement of equipment and workers in, and extricated resources out. Pollution, destruction of the environment and land-grabbing are part and parcel of the economic exploitation of Tibet, and of little concern to China’s government. This is a deep source of grievance to Tibetans and increasingly a flashpoint for protest.” [Source]

Taking Tibet as an example, currently there are 1,787 venues for various religious worship activities there, with 46,000 resident monks and nuns, said the white paper released by the Information Office of the State Council.

Living Buddha reincarnation, a special succession system of Tibetan Buddhism, is respected by the state, it said, adding that there are 358 living Buddhas in Tibet.

[…] The Chinese Islamic Association has compiled and published Islamic scriptures in Arabic. The Association has also set up a website in the Uygur language, providing introduction of religious knowledge and online explanation of the scriptures.

In 2014, a total of 14,466 Chinese Muslims made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Relevant government departments have sent accompanying medical staff to guarantee the pilgrims’ health and safety, the paper said. [Source]

]]>184109Words of the Week: Death by Nightmarehttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/05/words-of-the-week-death-by-nightmare/
Thu, 14 May 2015 19:39:55 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=183562The Word of the Week comes from the Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon, a glossary of terms created by Chinese netizens and encountered in online political discussions. These are the words of China’s online “resistance discourse,” used to mock and subvert the official language around censorship and political correctness.

@Benlee_MM: What’s Up With “Naturally”?: Recently, a criminal surnamed Wang in the Nehe Prison in Heilongjiang had relations with the wife of a certain Officer Li. And the surveillance video was “naturally” lost? In ’09 a young man from Yunnan, Li Qiaoming, died from “hide-and-seek” in detention, and the camera was “naturally” broken; in the same year Li Wenyan from Wuhan died from a nightmare while in detention, and the surveillance hard disk was “naturally” broken. Government credibility has been eroded by responisble leaders failing to see this footage and not recognizing the mistake. Do you believe it? I do! (January 25, 2015)

“Despite several years of reform, police are torturing criminal suspects to get them to confess to crimes and courts are convicting people who confessed under torture,” said Sophie Richardson, China director. “Unless and until suspects have lawyers at interrogations and other basic protections and until police are held accountable for abuse, these new measures are unlikely to eliminate routine torture.”

After cases of police brutality against criminal suspects emerged in 2009 and 2010, causing a major public outcry, the Chinese government announced new measures to curb miscarriage of justice and torture. These included legislative and regulatory reforms, such as prohibitions against using “cell bosses” to manage other detainees, and practical steps such as videotaping some interrogations. In 2012, when the government revised the Criminal Procedure Law, there were hopes that the strengthened procedural protections, including an “exclusionary rule” prohibiting the use of evidence directly obtained through torture, might improve the treatment of ordinary criminal detainees. The Ministry of Public Security, the agency in charge of the police, claims that the use of coerced confessions has dropped significantly in 2012 as a result of the reforms.

While the measures appear to have reduced certain abuses, such as those conducted inside police detention centers where suspects are held before trial, some police officers deliberately thwart the new protections by taking detainees away from these facilities for interrogations or by using torture methods that leave no visible injuries. Videotaped interrogations are routinely manipulated: for example, rather than recording the full interrogation, some officers take the suspects out of detention centers to torture them, then take them back into the detention centers to videotape the confession. Procurators – officers from the agency responsible for the investigation and prosecution of crimes – and judges sometimes ignore clear evidence of mistreatment or fail to examine the claims seriously, rendering the exclusionary rule of little benefit. […] [Source]

“They handcuffed me and then hung the handcuffs on the windows,” a former detainee based in the central province of Hunan told Human Rights Watch. “I was hung like a dog.”

The report focused only on suspects of non-political crimes, such as robbery and organized crime, said Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch.

“We have to take into account that the torture of political criminal suspects often is worse and the report doesn’t cover Tibet and Xinjiang,” Wang told Reuters, referring to troubled western regions that China keeps on a tight rein. [..] [Source]

In the 99 days that followed, Mr. Yu was interrogated roughly 200 times, sometimes for 20 hours a day – a treatment that remains routine in China today, which remains plagued with judicial system abuses that continue to exist despite legal reforms, a new report from Human Rights Watch underscored Wednesday.

When the people interrogating Mr. Yu decided he was not cooperating sufficiently, they placed him in a “tiger chair,” an instrument of torture that immobilizes prisoners by lashing down their limbs.

“The chair and the handcuffs were both very sharp. I have no words to describe the feeling. It was beyond what I could bear,” he said, the pain so intense that he cannot remember it clearly. Three times he was placed in the chair; once, his hands swelled to several times their normal size, making them so big it was nearly impossible to release the handcuffs.

[…] “If they could use torture of this kind on a lawyer, it’s impossible for ordinary people to receive real human rights,” he said. […] [Source]

It did not matter to the police that the man they seized in August 2013 was nearly 20 years older than the one wanted on fraud charges. Nor were the officers bothered by the fact that his cellphone number and a character in his name differed from those of the suspect, or by his repeated professions of innocence.

A week later, after interrogations that involved hanging him by his wrists and beating him into unconsciousness, they got what they wanted from the man, Chen Jianzhong, an illiterate wholesale vegetable dealer from a neighboring province: his fingerprint on a multipage confession they had written for him.

“I was so delirious I barely remember anything,” said Mr. Chen, 51, who spent more than 17 months in jail before he was exonerated and walked out a free man.

With one of the highest conviction rates in the world, prosecutors and the police in China rarely lose a case. […] [Source]

In November, the United Nations Committee Against Torture will review Beijing’s claims that detainee abuse has reduced in recent years.